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Colleen Clemens

Colleen is the associate professor of non-Western literatures and the director of Women's and Gender Studies at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. Her academic work has been published in Feminist Formations and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Clemens co-hosts the podcast Inside254, which focuses in depth on one current topic about labor, indigeneity, gender or world issues every other week. She can be reached via her blog.
lesson

The Real Monopoly: America's Racial Wealth Divide

Fifty-plus years after the end of legal segregation, individual African Americans have achieved amazing successes – including Barack Obama’s election as president. However, the black community as a whole remains under great stress. African Americans are overrepresented in prisons, underrepresented in college, and make less money, on average, than white counterparts in similar positions. How did this happen? As Obama pointed out in his groundbreaking 2008 speech on race, African Americans have historically been shut out of a number of paths to wealth, including membership in labor unions, access to FHA mortgages, jobs in civil service, and education in well-equipped schools. Other communities of color have faced similar obstacles – leading to a racial wealth gap that has made white people, on average, wealthier than people of color.In this lesson, students will get a glimpse of the long-term economic effects of race-based policies that have limited the economic opportunities of African Americans, Native Americans, and other communities of color.
Grade Level
9-12
Topic
Race & Ethnicity Class
Subject
Social Studies
Civics
Economics
Social Justice Domain
Justice
author

Tina Vasquez

Tina Vasquez is a journalist with more than 10 years of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, gender, labor and culture. She is currently a senior reporter at Prism, where she covers gender justice and workers’ rights. Previously, she was a senior reporter covering immigration at Rewire.News, the leading online publication devoted to evidence-based reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights and justice. Vasquez’s work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, NPR, The Nation, Playboy and a variety of other publications. She currently serves on the board of
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Informational

The Fugitive Slave Bill

The Fugitive Slave Clause was a stipulation in the U.S. Constitution (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3) that enslaved persons who escaped to another state had to be returned to their previous enslaver if discovered. An essential component of the Compromise of 1850 included a strengthening of that clause, through what was known as the Fugitive Slave Bill of 1850. The bill served as a concession to southern congressmen who wanted increased power to capture formerly enslaved persons. Congress passed the bill on September 18, 1850, and President Millard Fillmore signed it into law on the same day.
by
United States Congress
Grade Level
9-12
Topic
Slavery
Subject
History
Social Justice Domain
Identity Diversity Justice Action